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| 1991 VW Golf Mk2 1.3 Ryder 1272cc Engine Bay |
Car: 1991 VW Golf Mk2 1.3 Ryder 1272cc
Colour: Marine Blue
VW Golfs always seem to require some sort of attention to the engine!
This car was a very cheap purchase (bought from a car dealer that accepted it as a part ex), and as we did not intend to put this car to immediate use, we decided to sort any bits that required any work or replacement parts first. We had already stripped some of the front of the car down to repair the small amount of damage on the front of the wing.
It soon became apparent that this car had a heater problem, we soon realised the heater radiator inside the car interior had a leak. We had to strip out quite a lot of the interior to remove and replace it. Luckily we had a spare on a car that we were about to scrap.
This did not resolve the issue of lack of heat inside the car once the engine was warm though. We had also changed the thermostat and replaced all the coolant.
We thought it might have an airlock in the system, so drained and refilled the coolant a couple of times, but still with no improvements.
Looking at the pipework, and trying to follow the direction of flow of water around the pipes, seemed hard, as all the pipes seemed to go to the thermostat housing, suggesting a simple, but bad design, where if there is a problem it could not sort itself out!
Anyway we were getting more and more confused, but, after a quick search on the internet, it seemed the lack of heat from the heater was a very common problem on the mk2 Golfs.
It turns out that the problem was connected to the inlet and outlet valves to the internal heater. These are both located in the engine bay just before the pipes go into the car and can just be seen on the right in the middle picture above.
It seems the valves fail over time, becoming seized up. So we decided to get some new ones from VW.
VW could only supply one of them! Saying that the one they could supply was a plastic valve, as the metal ones were all doomed to failure. They said the other valve was not in stock as it was also due a redesign, but they were not likely to be able to get any, anytime soon, and had not been able to supply them for over a year.
So we took the plastic one they did have and fitted it. This did not resolve the problem, as we needed two working valves for the flow to work again correctly.
We went back to the internet to see what others had tried! It appears many people simply removed both valves and replaced them with a short piece of copper pipe in their place. This would solve the problem of getting heat into the car, but then the engine itself would take far longer to heat up. So not an ideal solution then, as it could lead to more wear and tear or damage to the engine. (Better to have no heat than no engine)!
With no way of replacing the faulty valve, as even all the ones in the scrapyard, had either gone already or had them bypassed we needed some idea to resolve this. Due to the design and flow of the valves, you could not even buy an extra one of the one good valves that VW could supply and fit that either way around.
In the end we opted to drill a small hole through the bad valve we had, this meant that rather than the valve opening and closing properly, we would be allowing some flow of water through the valve at all times.
This was not as severe a solution as removing the valves completely, but was more of a happy medium!
VW assured us a replacement for the valve would be available sometime soon, but in the time we had that car, it still never became available!
So we just did the best we could with what we had! The heating and thermostat pipes were all reconnected to the engine. Other new parts like dizzy cap, rotor arm, spark plugs, air filter were also replaced with new. We also changed the oil and brake fluid making sure all the brakes were fully working prior to use. Luckily we did as we needed to replace both rear pistons.
We painted the cam cover with some high temperature black paint, as the rusty look was really spoiling the whole look under the bonnet. We even decided to treat the engine to a shiny new pipe, too!
This all took a lot longer than we thought it would just to sort out the original problem of no heat inside the car! At least in the end we managed to repair it, and without it costing very much. VW parts seem to be in plentiful and cheap (if you can get them!).
It was reassuring to know, that by the time we put the car on the road we had fully serviced it!
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